IV
The Tontine
For the man whose house is insured may thereby be rendered less rather than more careful with regard to the risk of fire.
—Josiah Royce, “War and Insurance,” August 27, 1914
What could be better? The canvas lounge by the side of the pool, the sun not yet high in the sky, no question of a burn with straw hats and the lotion. Ray likes to dip and dry off, then finish his second cup of milky coffee, which she brings along in a thermos. He’s all over brown, the darker frown on his face looks drawn in with lead pencil. You have to squint against the sun, but the frown comes when the mommies appear with the splashers, the squealers. Then Jen packs up, smiling—you want to be nice, to be friendly—and they hightail it back to the townhouse, theirs among so many, taking care at the steps leading down from the pool. Turn at the purple hibiscus, count down five units on the left, go round the greyhound trembling in its cage, frightened almost to death by the scrape of the lounge chairs against the walkway. The dog’s high, plaintive yowling.
“They starve them for the track, hungry to chase the rabbit. It’s a rescue operation. I was never into dogs.” Ray knows about the track—horses, not dogs. “Punks run the dogs.”
Seven on the right from the gas grill chained to the fence and they are home, nine-thirty in the morning. Nothing could be better.
When the sun climbed over the lone date palm left at the edge of the parking lot, the depth of La Cumbra Terrace vanished. Units stuck one to another, row upon row, appear flat as cutouts, the paper decorations—Santas, hearts, angels she pinned on the bulletin board in the rehab back home. But early morning is good, each patio with an umbrella or a picnic table, pots of flowers and statues, each owner making their townhouse home. Early is best. The day follows.
Only he doesn’t look like a Ray who sold his business, small appliances, and came out here for the weather after angioplasty and a stent in his aorta, a risky operation. He will tell you about it if the talk is health talk, often the case when visiting with elderly neighbors. Ray still up for a game of golf, weekdays you don’t have to wait till hell freezes over before you tee off.
“Well, it’s heaven out here.” Jen laughs, tapping her husband on the wrist. Another glass of wine with folks from St. Paul, then it’s home to supper. She’s some cook and will tell you about it at length, about fusion, her spicy black-bean sauce, her blowfish risotto. Up to the minute—well, you have to be, nobody’s going to find Jen, that roly-poly, playing bingo at the Senior Center. Three days a week yoga at home when he’s off to the course, lays out her mat, slips in the video, mutes it, and what could be better than the gentle stretch, the slow bend. Jen knows about the body, the story it tells of anxiety, cramped muscles that won’t give in to pleasure, to the extension of life.
“We never had kids,” she says, “that’s why Ray’s such a grouch with the splashers.”
This evening they are having a cookout at the Mortons’, three units from the greyhound whining and scratching at its cage. Ray sneaks down the walkway with a hunk of lamb off his kabob and feeds the poor thing.
“Do you think you should have? With the curry and all?”
The nights are so long in the Summer, just like back home, “Only in Vermont you could use a sweater.”
The Mortons, native Californians, have done New England, been to Vermont, but not up past Brattleboro, where Ray had the store. He doesn’t look like a storekeeper—gnarled, you would say, knots big as tennis balls in his legs. Always looking around on the course, kind of a tic, tight swing and a dash for the golf cart like it’s leaving, last bus out of town. He’s, you would say, swarthy, with a gut over his belt no bigger than a dirt-bike tire. A nervous guy, wisps of black hair—does he dye it?—rough features, the old wood-carver himself in a storybook not for children.
What could be better than having a husband who gets out of the house, plays golf with a bunch of old geezers? She is splayed in the half cobra position attempting stillness of mind. Thing is, she is hefty, no longer young, though she doesn’t show her age—the henna wash, the contacts, the clothes California-gaudy after all those years in woolly Vermont with the pancakes and maple syrup. Cobra pose, she’s a beginner—stretch, aim at union. She knows the body, worked with every muscle, bone and tendon, while Ray kept the store. Famous in the rehab, Jen’s gentle massage and the vigor of her manipulations. Now she would like to get beyond body, beyond body type, which roots her as earthbound, dependable, persistent, all those cold years unable to imagine her life. Now she imagines every day on command, imagines a town north of Brattleboro, Vermont, which is not unlike a town in Rhode Island, only there is no bay, no shore, no prospect. Quilts and maple syrup, inventing herself each day, she leans heavily on snow, on black ice and the brick mills of New England, which might be the textile mills along the Providence River, or the foundries of Ansonia, Connecticut, where she once traveled as a girl, an excursion to a cemetery, her dad driving the company Ford. Before Bel won the Buick.
Jen Peebles aims for clarity, but it’s old dog new tricks, and with effort she flips to the corpse position. Clarity of mind in which she selects from Ray’s stories. Not the store in Vermont with the convection ovens, juicers, bread makers, microwaves, and why he never went in for the hassle of fridges, TVs. His fish stories, how you advise your customers of the warranties, “You’d be surprised, they don’t send in the warranties.”
No half-told tales of graft and corruption. “You get started as a kid. There’s no turning back, Rita.”
A slip when they are alone. Alone in the townhouse with leased furniture and climate control. Alone with her thoughts, knowing she will never know the full story, Manny turning state’s evidence, facts—figures, dates, names, names spilled out with a plea for mercy. That he came clean, witnessed, went straight to her heart.
“Quit school. Out in the boats. What, are you going to bring your children up in some Portuguese shack, like it’s old time fishing? Catch of the day?”
There is no turning back.
She is certain of their present safety when the marshal comes by, a young woman conventionally suited for a bank, for the office. Not a looker, dull brown hair, serious and pale like she lived somewhere else, not sunny CA. Ray assures their keeper they’ve had no contact, their cut-off complete, finito. The young woman—niece? possible daughter of friends?—affects an air of concern.
“Oh, we’re doin’ fine.”
“Never better.”
Which means nowhere near death or disclosure, drinking iced tea this day, something of an occasion. It has been a year since Rita Murphy Salgado handed over her car at Bradley Airport and came out to join Manny.
Ray and Jen visiting with a young neighbor from Vermont. The cookies are delicious, a touch of anise. On the financial side, Jen holds the cards: “You know my father was in insurance. He provided.” This announced proudly at each visit, so they may have attached Ray’s house, the car, left him flat broke where he began as a boy going out for the cod, but she’s clean, standing pat. She could almost laugh at the clever transfer of her money. Ray says it’s like those scams you read about. “Slippery bank accounts some Caribbean island, but legal, set up by the feds. They get away with murder.”
“Not funny,” Jen says.
Every visit, the marshal suggests there are occasions when a witness in the program gets a bit gabby, self-destructs, or occasions when the old life spills over, that’s to say recurrence of unhealthy habits.
“Nothing like that,” Ray says.
The marshal’s cell beeps. She talks in short, coded sentences, takes her leave, and Jen wonders how many clients, if she calls them clients, will she call on in a day, like a social worker, like the women who sent her out on assignments, sent her to Manny’s wife, thinking of that poor woman lying in a hospital bed set up in the Florida room. Official, checking them out, Miss Marshal made her visit.
“A tough cookie,” says Ray.
“She was only speaking of unhealthy, a way of life.” Now, why did she say that, when they are here in the sun, free and easy, safe as townhouses? A phrase which might amuse her mother, dead this past year. Funny thing is, when the marshal comes round to check out the present, both Peebleses are overwhelmed with the past. Ray stands guard at the front window waiting for his buddies to circle the block, escort him to a meeting in Providence or Boston’s North End, the fishing business extended to construction, money in urban renewal, like he said to the feds, he was middle management—dispensable, that’s the word. On the record union boss? So tell us about the structure of the company, they said, nature of the contracts, tell about accidents. All very polite until, sucking in his breath, the young U.S. Attorney got rough about maybe drugs, a little medication dealt on the docks, and listed charges which if you thought about time away would add up. How old are you now, Mr. Salgado? So you have something to tell us?
“You feel she didn’t want chat today with the tea and the cookies.” Manny packs the cell to call from the course. What could be better than a thoughtful man who calls home to pick up whatever for supper?
And Rita, why be drawn into the make-believe of their plot, Rita moons about the empty living room with the lean sofa and comfy modern chairs, arranges a vase, a statue of the Little Mermaid on a shelf with a Sessions clock bought at an antiques fair, an old Bakelite clock made in Connecticut. It lost time. Manny laughs when she winds it.
“Don’t say it.”
He says not a word about the clock on the stove, or the battery clock on the bedside table. Kind to her always, that was how it started, Rita falling for—low-life, her brother called him—hood with a dying wife who wanted out of this life. Settled in the cocoon of her silk coverlet among flourishing houseplants, Carlotta Salgado smiled faintly at the plump woman who came to massage her body as though to awaken it in a story that cheated death. Manny so obliging, ate the muffins she brought, though no need with the housekeeper and the disapproving daughter who lived down the block. A neighborhood of fancy houses, the new breed of lawyers, dentists, bankers who commuted to Providence, using the old mill town, the fishing port, as a suburban refuge from city life. Well, small town was enough for Rita Murphy with her work, bringing life back to the atrophied limbs of her patients in rehab, driving out on assignments which were seldom as useless as working the blanched legs and arms of Carlotta Salgado. She remembers placing the soft rubber ball in the slack hand that refused this little gift of possible improvement, the bright red ball dribbling across the tiles of the Florida room, and Manny scooping it up, throwing it to her, their smiling together, the situation hopeless. She knew that the men waiting for him were thugs. If her father had been alive, but what use Tim Murphy’s moral fiber, as her mother called it, a breakfast food promoted by God, or her brother, the priest too good for working with bodies, or Bel, who abandoned the tempting image of herself in satin and pearls. No use at all, and what could be better than a man who needed her comfort? She’d never see sixty again.
“You’re my babe,” he said, his sweetie pie, doll, Manny’s talk out of date, out of innocent times gone by. Times when he talked about his business she didn’t get the lingo at all. Didn’t want to know, that’s the truth of it. He was kind, calling her after Carlotta died for sympathy in short supply, his kids disconnecting years before the investigation. One night he took her to dinner in Providence, fancy steak house in town, a spot once known for seafood, now steel and glass with college-kid waiters. She laughed at every little invention, the fluted napkins, lilies floating in water, the water eight dollars a bottle, the pêches flambées, laughing together as though she was free of Bel and the shingle cottage, as though he’d washed his hands of fishy business. That was the night he drove her home. Seeing that her mother’s light was out, they prowled the house like thieves, took the risk of stealing upstairs to her room with the stuffed animals and the photo of her brother in a black cassock. They stood apart, these awkward lovers, for their strange mating had taken place in an airport hotel off the highway, no need for words now as he touched the pristine bureau scarf, nail buffer, beads and bracelets spilled on a china tray, the trinkets of a girl, which is what she finally heard, girl, “That’s my girl,” in his hoarse male whisper. She knew it was her innocence he fell for, hook, line and sinker. Her big panda’s glass eyes shone with blank gaiety, her own eyes brimming with girlish emotion.
Their romance had flourished, an undercover operation right through the investigation. And what’s wrong with saving yourself? A new page, Father Joe? Deep breathing, clearing her mind, the yoga instructor thin, young, agile, her body twisted in a pretzel. Rita, still a beginner, closes her eyes, a year in this valley that spreads out from Los Angeles. She remembers the day Manny picked her up at LAX, the sun through smog as expected, heavy traffic and, set up on the dry brown hill above La Cienega, the famous HOLLYWOOD spelled out, a bit dusty, W tilted. Was the sign there when her mother lived in this city of dreams? That night when she unpacked—the furniture motel-modern, bed and dresser of pale laminated wood—she set The Silver Screen under bright T-shirts bought back home while she waited patiently for Bel to die, bought for the new life with Manny waiting for her on the patio with a bottle of wine. The fan magazine had always been hidden in Bel’s closet, off limits. At the door of this bright impersonal room, she turned and retrieved it. Show it to Manny, that was her thought, Hollywood, the connection.
“Look.” She flipped to “The Sweethearts of Yesteryear.” “I wasn’t kidding.”
“Never thought you were.”
He studied Isabel Maher in the fading California sun. The pearls and white couch had yellowed on the cheap paper; the star of the silents’ glossy cap of black hair dimmed to gray. “Ancient history,” he said, not unkindly.
This was their first night in the new world. The jet lag, the wine made her giddy. The Silver Screen lay between them. “Wasn’t she swell?”
He had ordered in Mexican. Manny in the kitchen a sight to behold, juggling tortillas and salsa. She found her way back to the bedroom, tucked Bel out of sight in the dresser. In the morning she would learn the details of Ray and Jen Peebles, the childless couple who fled the cruel winters in Vermont. Ray had come out to La Cumbra Terrace to settle in. Months back it seemed plausible, what with the bypass, stent in the aorta, that she took on the stress of selling off the house and the store.
The yoga instructor closes her eyes, brings it down, mouthing words of inner beauty and peace. At the end of the tape, her hands come together as Joe’s hands in prayer, a few words of grace before supper at Land’s End. Their parents’ laughter when the town actually named the lane, by order of the U.S. Post Office. With some difficulty, Rita gets up from her exercise mat. She is sixty-nine years old—now, isn’t that something—flexing and stretching in the promised land. Press rewind for day after tomorrow, when Manny plays golf. Suppose she went to the phone and called Joe at Loyola. No, went to the Mortons’. Manny’s belief: their phone tapped.
Suppose she called it a crisis, her need for ancient history, or called simply to hear his voice say Rita, her name. Four o’clock back east. He’d have finished his lauds or complines, whichever came after noon. What a natural way to keep track of the day, Bel said, “Sunrise, sunset, call of the bells!”
“But the clock factory!” She’d said that to her mother as though to argue, then fell silent. She would only provoke the story of the quartz watch that killed her grandfather Pat Maher, who died back in mechanical time.
And the Russians are coming to supper—Nina and Ash, who live directly across the walkway with a grape arbor over their patio and little white lights left up since Christmas, though they are Jews. Young people, transplants like so many of the old folks in townhouses that go on and on in the Valley. There’s always an awkward moment when Ash asks about the store in Vermont, why Ray stuck with small-time appliances. Wal-Mart move in, sell the techno, read manual, easy as pies. Language breaks down. Ash does something advanced with computers. The Mirskys are blond and hearty, happy with their lives, all aspects—the Mexican tiles of their temple, the shopping, deli knishes and rugelah they will bring in a pastry box from Bel Air, not clear what Nina does there for a living. That’s how it is at La Cumbra, the woman who owns the greyhound works for a studio, something to do with costumes, away on location. Why rescue the starved dog only to cage him? Ray and Jen Peebles have their script in hand, but in the shower, work and lives reel in Rita’s steamy head: Mangione’s hardware store; Phil Dunn, carpenter; the Dunphys keeping books at the mill. A clear memory of Henri Pinchot slipping her foot into the measuring device, 6B, a dainty foot for a large woman. Daddy, the provider: insurance. A heavy burden of the past when the marshal comes by, and today marks a year of the plausible life, a year and a day since Bel’s death, that would be. The pock-pock of firecrackers in the parking lot sets the greyhound keening. Fourth of July.
Rita runs for the phone decently wrapped in a towel. Lemon-grass and wasabi, any market along the way. What could be better than a man who picks up what’s needed for supper? On her knees, the familiar position of prayer, clear in her mind, she tells the Hail Marys of childhood. Praying for the phone to ring, for Father Joe with no crisis, just her brother and their mumbled words of forgiveness, the way they made up when they were kids after a row. She was not herself those days after Bel died, not poor old Rita, second fiddle, good soul. Possessed by the dream of departure, she refused Joe’s counsel, his priestly advice. Her future all planned with such care by Manny and the U.S. Attorney. That youngster, what right had he to ask was this her choice? He could see she knew next to nothing about her husband’s affairs. Twisting the new ring on her finger, there was no turning back. What was she, femme fatale, schemer like Stanwyck in Double Indemnity? Well, her dad didn’t buy the insurance agent in that movie, poor chump come to the door to renew the lapsed policies on the Plymouth and La Salle.
“Couldn’t keep his pants on.”
“Now, Tim, he was vamped by her ankle, that’s all the Hays Office let by.” Bel allowed the end of the book was better. “They’re stuck with each other till the end of the line. Like the schemer says, can’t get off the trolley.” Her mother, such a reader.
Rita prays, the old formula of repentance, heartily sorry, begging forgiveness, then slips into the palms and parrots, the bright muu-muu her husband loves. The pock-pock of firecrackers, whiz of a rocket. One year to the day, Bel laid out in a violet silk dress never worn, bought years back as though for the occasion of death. Rita’s hand trembles as she dials Father Flynn, Joe’s friend at Loyola. Joe won’t have a phone in his name, inviting hardship not required by the order. The phone rings, then Flynn’s firm classroom voice: Leave a message.
To speak, speak to my brother, her words gobbled, No crisis, in tears, a year and a day. Can’t leave my number.Tell Joe waiting is gruesome, like Daddy’s Tontine.
Why bring up family stories? Father Flynn could never guess their embarrassment when Dad talked insurance—false claims, swindlers attempting to pull the wool over Prudential’s eyes. The Great Fire of London? Did they know that tragedy was responsible for houses of brick, safer than thatch and wood, like the third little pig’s—couldn’t blow down? Marine insurance. Didn’t they live right here in Rhode Island? Insure the ship and its cargo. Slaves were cargo of value. How many ships sailed out? How many lost at sea, not to mention mutiny, pirates? That was exciting when they were children; later, sighs of boredom, their father, spare with words, revving up for what Joe called his claims for insurance. The Tontine! Then they were in for it, Lorenzo Tonti, the Italian who made his way to Paris to sell his scheme to enrich the bankrupt King of France. The King wasn’t buying. Tim Murphy called Tonti’s partnerships a scam. Yearly contributions and the money of whoever dies first is thrown in the pot and so on, death upon death until the last man standing gets the prize.
Gruesome, Bel’s word, waiting for others to die. Waiting for the crisis promised by the marshal, the young attorney? Rita’s only prize—her deathbed reunion with Joe. Tonti was on the take, yet couldn’t feed his family. His system might tempt you to murder or fraud. Betting on lives, such gambling was not assurance. Oh, you can insure against invasion and rain, insure the twinkle toes of a dancer. Seventeenth century, you could insure against going to hell. Joe said he got it out of newsletters, the Insurance Society of America, their father no student of history. Dad’s lesson, thrusting his good arm forward to make the point, the power of human control over the accidents of daily life. He believed in his product. More than his daughter believes in the double bed in this room, or the woman in the mirror with mahogany hair, a pudge draped in bright flora and fauna, crying over the spilt milk of the past. She has not made the connection to her brother, the only living soul who can laugh at Daddy’s Tontine. When the telephone bill comes, Manny will discover her call to Loyola.
“Io.You’re Io,” Joe said, as though assigning her to a part in the make-believe of little children, but they were in high school, the first years of his Latin studies, already acknowledged to be preparation for his calling. His teacher had rewarded him with the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses . Joe latched on to the pagan tales, wild stuff. “Io, it’s the name of a cow.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“I mean, a cow can’t speak, speak our language.” He was standing at the door of her room, recently gone teen-girl with lace bureau scarves and ruffled curtains, a fringed lampshade that cast his sister in a forgiving light. On the crocheted bedspread, a rabbit in a peach satin gown clutched a celluloid carrot between her paws. He stood with the Metamorphoses in hand, his finger marking the page where Io, a lovely nymph, is transformed into a white calf by Juno so Jove can’t have at her. That’s not what he meant to tell Rita, not that love stuff of the story. Balanced on the threshold, Joe was reluctant to enter her world of fancy toys not meant to be played with. Photos of smiling girls who could do no wrong in the movies, Deanna Durbin and Gloria Jean, were stuck in a mirror. Why her crush on goody-good stars with show-off opera voices? Rita couldn’t carry a tune; besides, he’d come to say something about how she doesn’t talk anymore, not walking home from school or at supper, not in Bel’s car.
She laughed. “I’m a cow. So what’s your problem?”
“Forget it, no problem.” He went back to his room, lay on his Indian blanket. He turned to the page where Io’s family does not know the beautiful white heifer, sadly mooing, to be their daughter and sister. With one forefoot she makes an I in the dirt and an O beside it. Perhaps he had only wanted to read that story of the mute calf to Rita. In his godless book so many stories within stories to believe while you were reading them. Not all nymphs come to a happy end. Joe was fifteen, not ripe for preaching, for speaking in parables about the end of childhood, of filial affection. In the end Io is claimed by her family and awarded a lover. Her mooing gives way to speech.
As Rita’s blubbering did to Paul Flynn long-distance. Her husband will see the telephone bill, or the call to New York may be picked up by the marshal. Suppose she were to retrace her steps, get a plane out of LAX to Bradley Airport, take the keys to her car from a plainclothes official, bit player in the film run backwards until she was once again hauling her suitcases—thump, thump, thump, up the stairs in the shingle cottage, a comic rewind. Then Father Joe would be strolling down the lane, breviary in hand, never play the bitter scene with his sister. Alas, her departure is as frozen in time as Isabel Maher’s in My Darling Daughter, though Rita was never doomed by a bankrupt father to marry a slick Moneybucks, yet she was surely Daddy’s darling, like the innocent American song says—a boy for you, a girl for me—that’s how the Murphys sorted out into teams—can’t you see how happy we would be. She’s not simple, never was, just grounded like Tim Murphy, no flights of fancy, no artifice to her at all. Miscast as Jen Peebles in her adventure with Manny.
On the day her father died, a Saturday, she’d been on duty at the rehab coaxing a patient to take a few steps free of the walker, a gruff Vietnam vet in a black T-shirt with an emblem of crossed bones, tibia of both his left and right leg shattered on the road that led to Newport Beach, a bikers’ rally. A sweet man broken in spirit by the war he’d not won. He took a step, then two, then fell against her strong body.
“Pisser!”
“Try again.”
“Give up on me, Rita.” He wanted the walker, the wheelchair.
When she drove home that day, there was Bel in the garden, naturally, a flowing skirt and crisp apron, head tied in a kerchief, the idealized peasant—not her daughter’s thought, yet a flick of recognition went through Rita’s head. Where had she seen such a costumed worker? A bright summer day, the windows of the house open, the unmistakable patter of a Red Sox game. Her father would be watching. She’d sit by his side, rooting for the team as she did often, once till late at night—a spectacular overtime. Her mother, puffed with pleasure, held a pot of brilliant red flowers, smiling as though posed for a snapshot. Yes, Bel, I see you. Who could miss that grin of satisfaction?
Her father stiff as a pillar on the couch. She knew at once that he was dead, not sleeping through Yankees 2-0, ninth inning, Yastrzemski at bat, two men on for the Sox. She marveled at the death grip of the beer can in Daddy’s good hand, the hand he’d trained like a magician’s to do everyday tasks, beat the odds. She stole across the carpet and sat beside him. His eyes were fixed on the screen. She lifted the injured arm, no pulse. These fingers had always been stiff, now she caressed them, father and daughter breathless as the crowd in Fenway Park. The first pitch low, inside. Yaz tipped off, fouled again and then the miraculous crack of the bat, the ball sailing beyond the distant Green Monster, out of earthly bounds. The crowd went wild as she closed her father’s eyes, turned off the set and went to get Bel, her tears silent, not sharing the homer. The next day she would read the score to her mother, Bel, a picture in widow’s black. Then Rita remembered the three of them, late show on a Saturday night, the long skirt and nurse’s white apron of 1916. Farewell to Arms, Helen Hayes wiping the brow of Gary Cooper, an injured soldier she loved, though in the end it’s the angel of mercy who dies.
On her way to the kitchen, Rita slaps the fan magazine down on the glass coffee table for anyone to see Garbo’s head thrown back in abandon, eyes half closed in cool seduction. The star of stars clutches a richly embroidered shawl round her shoulders, which might drop at any moment, any moment on the set of The Divine Woman, 1927. “Where Have They Gone?” Hollywood looking back on its short history, nostalgia for sweethearts of yesteryear at the outset of the Second World War. Bel was beautiful, but even in satin and pearls just the girl next door, or so her daughter thinks as she hacks away with the poultry sheers, severing duck breast from ribs, thighs from legs. The marshal’s visit has brought on such grieving for the past, yearning for the present, let it come down to this year and a day. Tomorrow she should be at Bel’s grave with a tribute—a book, a flower. Her every move now extremely dangerous, recklessly chopping bok choy, the blood runs free from a cut on her finger. In the drone of climate control, a touch of vertigo. Rita Murphy finally gets it: she’s not leading her own life.
Manny finds her crying with a giant Band-Aid on her wound. “Babe!” Kiss to the injured finger, she’s his cutie, knows nothing beyond what she’s told, nice Catholic girl with stuffed animals who came to work over Carlotta, didn’t know she was coming on to him with the muffins, with jokes circulating in the rehab. “Sweetheart, sell it as a leaseback,” he instructed when they could figure with some accuracy Bel was not immortal. Crappy little house. Quaint, that’s what she called it, fisherman’s cottage, view of the bay. What did people like the Murphys know of fishermen, two families to a shack? Miss Marshal inferring, that’s the word, he’d lucked out living off his wife’s money, off her care, no one else gave a damn. Rita, kindness itself, asking after his game. He’d whacked, sliced air, run for cover under the awning of the golf cart. Righteous, that’s the word—bitch of a woman’s talk of unhealthy habits. What’s unhealthy thinking about the boss he put away, man he worked for not exactly going to the office, though like he said, middle management, bastard kept him down. Tony and the grandson came along for the ride, smart boys bailed out well in advance of the investigation, don’t give a hot damn he’s dead or alive. Plain Jane comes in her navy blue suit for iced tea, upsets Rita. Finito, no connections.
“That cap!” OK, she’s laughing at him with the Korean chopper in hand.
He’s still wearing his cap, makes him look like Jimmy Cagney, Yankee Doodle Dandy, twenty years watching old movies with her mother after the provider passed on, straight arrow with the busted arm.
“Sixth of July, I came out here.”
“It’s the Fourth.”
“So not quite a year in L.A.” She knows it’s nine o’clock in New York. If Joe is home, no chance he is reading theology in the dreary cell he calls home, viewed once on a trip to the big city, a conference on sports medicine, therapists from the sticks, demos on new tricks with the body. The mind. She was not supposed to be in priestly quarters at Loyola—an aging population, her brother said, showing her his iron bed, straight chair, faded Kodachromes of family. Nine, he’s playing chess with Flynn, a gentle addiction. On this day he must be remembering Bel, maybe even his sister, how she had gone sour and feisty. Following her heart, wasn’t that the idea? She hears Manny in the shower singing; now, isn’t that fine. What could be better than running her life, wok on the range. A year and a day since her mother called out for Joey, who never got the message. When she ran to Bel’s side only silence, the blessing of a hand shooing her off. To let her go free, that is how she thinks of her mother’s last gesture. Free, she goes to the coffee table, looks Garbo in the eye, a beauty who left the business. Rita is running her life. She has called Flynn, set out The Silver Screen. Let it come down.
Nina and Ash arrive with grapes from their arbor, who would believe it? Little red grapes sweetened by the sun. The Peebleses are their American neighbors they treat with respect, as they would old people in Georgia, where they were raised, by the Black Sea’s side, Ash explains. He calls the Peebleses Ray and Jen, is the California way. Ray mocks his L.A. enthusiasm for traffic on the freeway, exhibitionists parading the beach at Venice. Nina, an aficionado of everything Disney, has been twice on the studio tour. Tonight, Fourth of July, they have come with a dry white from Sonoma and the rugelah Nina picks up in Bel Air, each stuck with a little American flag. Dinner is otherworld, nothing Jen cooked up in Vermont—sweet-hot dishes surprising the jaded palate. From down the walkway a char smell of barbecue.
“Please!”
Ray closes the sliding glass door. You have to savor faint perfume of basmati, scent of ginger honey on duck breast. Not U.S. of A. for the glorious Fourth. Amazing what she has picked up a year away from pancakes and sausage. Fusion, the men sit outside with vodka and counterfeit Cuban cigars. Battery of pock-pock-pocks like gunshot in movies. The greyhound yelps, his cries high pitched, constant.
The women wash up, then drink dainty cups of black coffee. There is nothing to say, once Jen’s called up the parade with the mayor of Brattleboro, with war vets and the high school band. Neighbors without gossip, without talk beyond weather, television news. Nina picks up the fan magazine. “So old! Is who?”
“Garbo!” Doesn’t know Garbo? Can she be that young, that foreign? And then, why not when dealing with such a blank slate? Rita Murphy turns to the picture of Isabel Maher.
“This is my mother.” She speaks slowly. Nina will understand: “My mother, she was a star.”
“Is true?”
True to Nina as murky photos of czarinas, as Snow White bedding down her dwarfs, as Tinker Bell or Pocahontas, as sipping black coffee in La Cumbra Terrace, township of Tarzana, San Fernando Valley. True and amazing, an American story, figuring the silent star born before Revolution, before Stalin in Politburo. Language breaks down. Eight o’clock Pacific Time. The Mirskys and Peebleses watch the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a stirring salute to America, security tight in the Hollywood Bowl. The capacity crowd assured by Kenny Rogers, hardly your dad, still fatherly, mellow, tried-and-true singing the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, sing along, get it rolling. Bring it down to Lonesome Road and all through the philharmonic Gershwin, Copland, Grand Canyon Suite, Jen is fine allowing herself a sip of Ray’s vodka, a second sweet pastry. The light show super—red, white, and blue projecting Old Glory all through the Cole Porter, she’s OK, laughing at the maestro’s dip to “Love Me Tender” as though the wrong score and a wave goes through the crowd, His truth is marching on, fine during the commercials and a switch to Coke, to beer, enough with that vodka. Fine until the medley of Sousa marches, then she breaks down, holding Garbo to her breast, sobbing softly, but who can see in the last blue hour of a summer night? Who can hear with the patriotic pyrotechnics?
Be kind to your web-footed friends. The Sessions clock reads ten, that’s the next day in New York. Joe will sleep in peace, having said his lauds in that cell with two crossed sticks on the blank wall. Or may not sleep, having received her message. There is no crisis, no deathbed scene this day or tomorrow, L.A. or New York.
“Just so moving,” dabbing her eyes, bear hugs from the Russians. If she were home in Rhode Island, she would choose a book to lay on Bel’s grave, foolish, as though the story could seep into earth, the pages never yellow or blow away, a weight never finished, Bel’s book they laughed at, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.
Manny, a little tight, stumbling into his pajamas. His calves knotted, lower back cramped. She has failed with every manipulation of his body, every laying on of hands. He lies stiff as the dummy she practiced on when first learning her therapeutic trade. What could be better than a pat of his hand? The night follows. Pock of the firecrackers, screech of rockets. Carousing up by the pool. The greyhound’s cry endless, caged poor thing. Nine o’clock in New York. Joe may not be at Loyola, the season each year of his visit. She prays he is off on retreat, will not hear a word of her gibberish, weeping to Flynn. That would buy time, go back, rewind, a blessing. Sleepless hours go by till she steals out of bed. Moonlight plays its tricks, white as snow on the roofs of La Cumbra, little peaked roofs of a village in Vermont, setting for a simple tale instructing children in good and evil. She steps out onto the warm bricks of the patio. Endless Summer in this place, dry heat they claim good for you, never a breeze. Rita waits, that’s how she will tell it, that she was simply taking the air when the blast went off louder than the rockets heard all through the night. The greyhound keening just broke her heart. She will say how the lights all down the walkway were off. Inside you don’t hear the yowling, with climate control, but she had stepped out, then turned back to her kitchen for the poultry shears and did not know what she was thinking, or was not thinking at all, as she found her way in the dark toward the purple hibiscus. The dog was trembling in his cage as though cold, no, afraid, the whole body alive with fear, poor scrawny thing, his coat smooth as silver when she put her hand in to comfort, just a touch. The woman who did something with costumes was not home—seldom home, she’d heard from the Mortons, three units down. Why rescue an animal you did not care for? Save it from chasing the mechanical rabbit? Cutting the wire that confined him, like severing duck wing from breast, leg from thigh, it was that easy. The dog’s heart thumping at a frantic pace in his narrow chest, stilt legs shaking. She will say, I thought to take him by the collar. There was a fancy collar with brass studs. And what did she think she would do with a stolen greyhound?
“Quiet him. Feed him. Take him to our condo, here in La Cumbra where my husband, Ray Peebles . . .
“But he bolted?”
“Yes, he ran free.”
Her husband slept through the disturbance, but a mother nursing her baby, that would be directly across from the Mortons, light from her window stretched to the patio, where the greyhound cowered and whined. Looking down from above, she saw the old lady in a nightgown. Yes, that nightgown with floppy sleeves like white wings. Crouched down on the walkway, clipping at the cage, that old lady she was sure of. The dog’s owner in Santa Fe on a picture. Someone fed it, walked it, a nuisance. And when the dog ran wild, the old woman ran after, tripping where the steps lead up to the pool. A dead dog on the highway, the identifying tag on his collar. In the morning police were taking pictures of the mutilated cage. The mother came with babe in arms to tell them, a witness.
It is ten by the Bakelite clock on the knickknack shelf in La Cumbra 63C.
“Anniversary, that’s the word,” Manny says. “Tell them, sweetheart, about the anniversary, your mother’s death. She was upset. The dog drove her crazy.”
Nursing her bruised knees, Rita speaks in her own defense, innocent admissions against self-interest, exhibiting the page with Isabel Maher on the MGM couch, 1928. “A year and a day my mother buried, not here, in Rhode Island.” She will repeat this down at the station, after she has been escorted past curious residents of La Cumbra. Mothers protect the squealers, the splashers from the sight of the woman who made nice every morning at the pool. In the parking lot, the faint gunpowder smell of firecrackers in the air. Though her crime is no more than a misdemeanor, the dead greyhound, poultry shears, Jen Peebles, née Murphy, is tabloid news, or no news at all, another looney-tune, but Area of Dominant Influence is L.A.; local item: Silent Screen Daughter Goes Nuts.
Upbeat woman at the news desk: You’ve got to love this Hollywood story. Swaddled in fox fur, tears in her eyes, Isabel Maher in My Darling Daughter, mother of the accused, Rita Salgado, the seventy-year-old resident of La Cumbra Terrace who came to Los Angeles to write her own script. Rita on the courthouse steps, a sober blue suit for her arraignment, waving to the delegation from the ASPCA noisily supporting her.The commentator mourning the greyhound.
Salgado,Witness Protection scrapped, an editorial decision.
The miracle of magnetic restoration provides a clip from the archives: Bel in a bathing suit flirts with a famous fatty, gives the camera the blink of an eye. Silent Screen Daughter, a thirty-second spot.
Limos arriving at the Getty Museum: a fund-raiser for the restoration of the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Griffith Park brings out the upper crust.
Rita’s moment prolonged by letters to the L.A. Times from the animal people: the perpetrator was kind, brave, that dog ill-nourished, starved for affection. The negligent owner of the greyhound protests, but dare not press charges. Rita Salgado is sentenced to community service in a rehab, the sentence suspended given her age.
Iced tea, but no cookies for this last meeting with the marshal. Turning to the young woman, who wears the gray uniform of her profession upon this occasion, Rita smiles, hoping for what? A frayed net of protection. Malicious mischief is not the marshal’s territory, but she is sympathetic to her clients, Rita and Manuel Salgado, suggesting they move to safe quarters, perhaps the Pacific Northwest. They must understand they are no longer in the program.
“Finito.” Manny sits next to his wife. “Thanks, we’ll stay on at La Cumbra.”
The Salgado story falls quickly into place with the neighbors: how he aided and abetted the investigation back east, turned in the boss and his buddies, went straight. Now Rita is free at last to call Father Flynn, who reveals with slow and deliberate care the news that Joe has been, indeed, at his post this past year at Loyola, but never got the message that all is well in California. He’s been gone now for some days. Gone off, call it a crisis of faith. Off, God knows where, leaving the address of a woman in Rhode Island.
“That Gemma.”
Yes, Gemma Riccardi, who apparently knows nothing, yet the note with her address signals some intention. Flynn thinks to say people disappear—in wars and natural disasters, in ordinary life—then thinks the big picture is worse, no comfort. Each night he calls Rita in Tarzana, California, believing it’s his way of grieving for the loss of his friend, the passing of their communal life. He plays chess against himself on the computer. His backpack and hiking boots sit by his door. He walks miles upon miles in Central Park. Its artificial rambles, heavy traffic of joggers round the reservoir can’t compare to nature untarnished or the solitude of the Trail. Involving himself in the Murphys’ plot, Father Flynn reports to the superior: Joe is away, settling his mother’s estate. Each night he calls, “Rita?”
Who else would be waiting by the phone? “Paul?”
They console each other. It has been three weeks since her appearance in court. Five nights since she first spoke to Joe’s friend without fear. “Manny’s so kind, right here by my side,” her throat clogged with tears. One night, visitors and Manny in the background, she whispers, “I don’t think he gets it, about Joey, about family.”
Father Flynn wonders how long they can indulge in their conspiracy. At the end of each call he repeats words that tell her nothing: “The Lord works in mysterious ways. Every day has its mysteries, Rita.”
She’d never let her brother get away with that. “Every day has its sorrows.”
Sirius, the dog star, is in the decline. The worst days of Summer coming to an end in an election year. The entertainment of political conventions consumes the country, though not Gemma Riccardi in her air-conditioned studio, working in a frenzy printing the photos of the neighborhood she takes each day. The Salgados do not venture out of climate control to the pool in the heat of the morning, each day a sizzling color-coded scorcher on the morning news, hovering near a hundred degrees. Manny switches channels, politics to last night’s Yankees, then comforts his wife with a cooking show.
“Come on, babe, he’s making the meatless lasagna.” Which for some reason sets Rita choking back tears. She has lost her taste for adventures in the kitchen, serves up microwaved Lean Cuisine. How Joe loved her home cooking when he came for his visits, pancakes and muffins, bloody steaks, home fries. The common room of Loyola is comfortable as Flynn checkmates himself in a thoughtless move, picks up the pieces and turns on a game, Red Sox 0, Yankees 3. Love the Sox, Murphy said, and you get your heart broken. There is need for fillers, harmless curiosities, sidebars of information to alleviate the domestic tax plans and global prospects of the candidates. At the loping end of a dull baseball season and in this political climate, the story of the greyhound does not go away.
In North Dakota an albino bison is born, one of its kind in the world, romps with its mother. A school of beached whales, gasping for air, wash up on the shore in Santa Barbara. Since the fables of childhood, animals are proven items, more often than not tugging at the heartstrings with the story of their dependence on our curiosity and our kindness, their mute wonder at clever creatures who built the Ark. Unlike the genetically bleached bison and flapping whales, the greyhound, unfortunately dead, lent itself to human interest beyond the thirty-second spot of local news. Never enough stories. Let the public consider the court’s indulgence to this aging woman who freed a caged dog in an act of mercy, a woman recently retired in Los Angeles, where strangely enough, her mother, a forgotten star of silent film . . . So it spins, and the dog struck down on the highway lights like a feather along with the droppings of Canada geese devastating golf courses across America. . . . Her mother, forgotten by the public—a clip of the Bathing Beauty vamping the famous fatty, scene set up by a gagman, then Rita in her courtroom suit waving to her supporters.
RERUNS
The sweetheart of yesteryear was not forgotten by Victor Szabo, a scholar hungry for any scrap dropped from the banquet table of silent screen lore, among his files the photo of Isabel Maher on the white couch, satin and pearls. He has read the untrustworthy piece in The Silver Screen that reveals the actress “romanced” by her director as well as other bigwigs in the business. In preparation for “The Hermeneutics of Silence,” he has studied the restored film of My Darling Daughter, lip reading to determine that Maher spoke every line of the script, that she could act had she not been in the heavy hands of William Banks, an uninspired director. Flirty and fresh, with a wry little smile, Maher was a sprightly comedian in many two-reelers, but no one of note in a list of lost sweethearts, not a snuffed candle to Garbo, Louise Brooks, but useful in a paper Szabo has in mind: “Mutations of Orality in Late Silent Film.” Isabel Maher’s precise delivery of her lines was a footnote to the work of Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, the greats who resisted crossing over, who got caught up in the trials and errors of synchronized motion and sound.
Never enough stories: Victor Szabo has been working up the silents for years, a slight fellow with squint eyes, oversized ears; looking and listening to silent film his life’s work, his calling. He can tell his students that Lloyd hangs from the minute hand on the clock in Safety Last, that the audience gasped aloud at the thrill of the bespectacled hero dangling high above the city street, a composite shot—four cameras, stunt man standing in for the star. He can tell them how many frames make up the sequence, but they are into random-access, non-linear systems, not a flicker of interest in ye olde Moviola—chitchat, filler—digerati waiting for Szabo to get off his hobby horse, get on with the lecture: “The Dialogic Speech Act in the Materiality of Ambient Sound.” Szabo is unashamed of his passion, sifting through re-recorded mixers, restorations; anthropology of sorts, with all the dangers of the natives dissembling or turning against you. When he calls the daughter of Isabel Maher, the husband says she’s upset with the death.
“The dog, that’s understandable.”
“Of her mother.”
Manny slams down the phone. He’s had it with the dog, the mother, the brother, with skimpy portions of Swedish meatballs, mac and cheese. Rita is fading on him, drooping, her complaints much like Carlotta’s. Now that the feds no longer pay up for the condo, now that they own the unit, nothing pleases his wife—the rented furniture, recycled air, never an ocean breeze. Enough—the old lady’s sofa, dining room chairs, like that was some palace, squat house end of nowhere. The yoga mat stuffed in the closet. Times when he’s watching the Yanks—who plays golf in this heat? Her old man hated the Yankees. Manny thinks how she blew his cover, the dog and her mother all over TV, how the boss could send someone out or make contact, some obliging contact in L.A., middle management, come to finish off Manny the Mouth. But that’s the old habits, old fears, finito. He looks at his wife waiting by the phone, remembers the good times, even Miss Marshal checking them out. “Sweetheart,” he says, “the weather breaks, we go up to the pool.”
Pluto, god of the underworld, keeps his wife half the year, the dark Winter half. So can he be cast as Rita Murphy’s husband? They live in climate control, a netherworld neither Summer nor Winter, comfort level A/C. She has followed him to this sunny place of her own free will (how free in the throes of love?), so the myth breaks down, as they mostly do when transcribed pagan to Christian, book to life, novel to film.Yet Manny is bewildered as many gods by his fate or his crime, a poor boy wanting to get the stink of fish off his hands, transformation on the waterfront, an American story.What did he do but make it nice for his wife, his children? What did he do to deserve their contempt? No longer acknowledged as their father when he calls, now that he can call, now that he’s out in the cold, so to speak? The son dusts him off. The daughter talks Jesus. He blames Carlotta for that, the Virgin in the garden, the rosary clutched in her dying hand. The good people of La Cumbra adjust to Salgado, one of those stories, you come out here from Russia, Rhode Island,Vermont.The wife caused the trouble.The cage is still there, the sharp flaps of its escape hatch a reminder of negligence. The dog’s owner off to the next film—wardrobe?
Pluto, god of death. Is it fair to paste that on Manny? What he spilled to the young prosecutor sealed, finito. Graft, robbery, murder suggested by the priest, Rita Salgado’s brother, who as a boy read Ovid, loving those stories that morphed one into another, as Peebles segues to Pluto, racketeering to small appliances, maple syrup to iced tea with the marshal. In Ovid each body is buried with a coin to pay the ferryman who crosses you over the river of death. Pay up, there’s no freebie, but not even a fair coin in Manny’s pocket. It’s some kind of hell in the townhouse with his wife on the phone for her evening consolation with yet another priest, and his daughter taped on TV declaring for Jesus, sickness is not of God, middle of the night Pacific Time, cheap time, the comics and reruns over nights you can’t sleep, his little girl lost in the crowd of weepers, wailers for their sins and forgiveness. “Some Catholic girl! A good thing your mother is dead.” Shouting at the screen as though it’s a lousy call at second base, and his wife, a ghostly apparition in the doorway, bleary-eyed. “Come to bed.” Pluto is not even a planet, just a dark icy star. Pluto, a Mickey Mouse dog, digs in the dirt for a bone.
In the spirit of scholarly intruder, despite the turnoff by Rita Salgado’s husband, the professor of silents makes his way to La Cumbra 63C, digital camera in hand. Rita steps out on the patio for yet another interview with the animal people. 100°.
Szabo spots Mr. Salgado putting on a felt green.
“Don’t mind Manny. Please, no pictures.”
“No pictures.” How to put it to this woman trapped in her own small story? “I admire your mother’s work.”
“She never worked.”
“Her work in the movies.”
“Bel never spoke of her time out here. She liked movies. We all do.”
He backs up. They gab about movies: how his mother took him as a kid to an art theater, the Thalia, Upper West Side of New York, showed the old pictures, the foreign films his mother didn’t want him to miss and the old silents, all flickering movement and light; how Rita Murphy watched late into the night, top of Bel’s hit list Hepburn and Roz Russell, Connecticut girls with lots of spunk, did he know?
“Watched late into the night.”
“Alone?”
“No, we watched together.”
“Bel, her voice? Can you tell me about her voice?”
“Oh, her voice was just fine. Daddy called it sweet, but I couldn’t see it.”
“Hear it?”
“Sorry I can’t invite you inside. My husband has trouble with strangers.”
A plastic golf ball pops against the glass door, Mr. Salgado’s contribution to . . . what might Victor Szabo call the aborted interview? Disruptive discourse. A splotch of red stains Rita Salgado’s throat, her eyes tear as she speaks of the greyhound and protection, how a cage is no protection. The professor is witness to a melt-down in the intolerable heat, thinks she could die right there on the simmering bricks, helps her to collapse in a hot metal chair. What comfort can he offer in this unfortunate pass?
“I have a print of Kid Tilly, one of her nifty two-reelers. You might like to see it.”
“Once. Not now. Let her rest. She wouldn’t want to know he’s a hood—Manny, I mean—or that Joey is missing in action. That’s my brother, the priest. Why let Bel see what’s become of her children?”
Szabo dizzy with the thought the woman has fallen off the bridge between then and now, living and dead, as though a close-up of Isabel Maher, hearing her daughter’s upset, might speak back, scold or comfort from the screen.
“She sounded, you know, like my mother.”
Manny at the sliding glass door, putter in hand: “Get what you came for?”
“He came about Bel.”
“Ancient history.”
“You said that before. You said that the night I came out here.”
Finding himself in a domestic dispute, Szabo is down the walkway, round the corner by the purple hibiscus, the turn to the Mortons’, finds his way to the pool, when she catches him up.
He takes the tattered copy of the old fan magazine from her politely, gossip by the yard. “Thanks, I’ve seen it.”
“How could you?”
The professor spells out archives, cultural history, leading to the interview with Isabel Maher in Classic. “Now, that picture of your mother is superb.”
“Classic?” Clutching The Silver Screen, the sacred text, “It’s all here about the director. And the other one. Wolf. She talked about him, not the movies.”
“Wolf?”
“Someone who made it out here. Watching the credits, Meyer, she said, Meyer was a bright boy.”
Not a bad sort, Szabo leads her back to 63C.
Her husband stands sentry at the glass door. “She’s upset.”
The scholar of silent trivia is dismissed. He’d like to say he’d come by with his photocopy from Classic, the studio shot of the young actress about to enter the star system, Bel, as her daughter called her, tousled, full of mischief in a fringed cowgirl skirt above her fetching knees, a live number not yet the dead meat on MGM’s couch. The interview, recalled from Victor Szabo’s trash heap of movie lore, in which Maher said her dad made guns back east, pistols not like the rifle she shot in Kid Tilly, and, believe it or not, she loved books, had no beaux. A peppy American girl—if they ever got the machine fixed up, she’d be happy to give talkers a go.
Before he is halfway back to the solitary viewing room of his apartment Szabo has figured Meyer as Meyer Wolf, who sure enough made it until he was blacklisted, then made it again, when all that was just history. Meyer Wolf: propaganda movies during the war, 1940s that war, Russkie peasants dancing, surfeit of balalaika, popular-front sentimentality, then ominous noirs of the Fifties, something gone rotten in the state of the nation. Meyer Wolf, the Oscars passed him by, yet a legend trotted out at Cannes some years ago, surfacing again at Sundance. It’s all been a goose chase, this business of Isabel Maher. Stay with Fields and Keaton, the mess Lloyd made of sound in Movie Crazy. That night Victor Szabo is distracted as he watches Monsieur Verdoux for the umpteenth time, can’t get his dander up about Chaplin abandoning the Little Tramp for this bitter French farce, anti-war, preachy anti-corporate script, not a moment of sublime footwork. Drinking Hungarian wine, the professor knows he will bore his students with the weak projection of Chaplin’s voice, a melancholy thought, for how often he tells them of the gasps and cries of the audience who came together for the silents. Live, they were alive, part of the show, women audibly sighing at Valentino’s kiss, yet he watches the serial killer, M. Verdoux, once again, unable to edit out the Salgados, that pathetic old lady, white roots striping her hennaed hair, the gnarled little husband dry as a prune, the dim shot of their unit, spooky as the motel room in Psycho. Szabo rewinds to the opening sequence: Verdoux clipping flowers with a comic twist to his mustache while yet another wife burns in the incinerator, a scene he forgives Chaplin, but tonight he ejects, gives in to his addiction. A helpless case, he finds Wolf, Meyer in the phone book. No longer a big deal, the writer is listed. It’s 2 A.M. He will call first thing in the morning.
Yes, he is that Wolf, Arroyo Terrace. Happy to show the professor around. Meyer Wolf, a prim little fellow at the imposing oak door. Wolf, late eighties? Fringe of white hair, pale skin, an ascetic in a white Japanese robe, same robe on his wife, who might be his twin twenty years younger, museum pieces, ivory carvings removed from the surround of Pasadena high-rises on the Boulevard. All is serene, even Meyer Wolf’s words spoken softly, not to disturb the dim religious light, the solemn perfection of beams, paneling, furniture and rugs, each exquisite hand-crafted artifact the work of Greene & Greene, 1908.
“Craftsman. Every stroke done by hand.”
But Victor Szabo hasn’t a notion about Greene & Greene which doesn’t ruffle the Wolfs. Their house is on the National Registry. It’s all in the books, and so, it turns out, is the blacklist, as well as the FBI file on Meyer Wolf—Young Communist League at Stanford, Spanish Civil War, articles in New Masses—all available to the professor. Not what this wound-up young man has come for. Young, Szabo not yet fifty, younger than Meyer’s wife, a colorless man with tired eyes, slab ears big as Bing Crosby’s. Not Un-American Activities, this small misunderstanding brushed away. Peace descends on the vast living room, which is cool in spite of the heat oppressing greater Los Angeles. Stop frame: they sit on uncomfortable low chairs in comfortable silence. Szabo thinks aura, emanation, time out of time.
He has come for further news of the inexhaustible silents.
Wolf says, “I remember absolutely everything, young man.That is my curse. Joseph Cotten, Citizen Kane.” Mrs. Wolf touches his hand. He need not go back there.
“It’s OK, Maya.”
Her beatific smile: we are here with the Van Eck lamps, the exquisite Tiffany inkwell, the prize Fulper pots.
Meyer turns to his interrogator. “Ask away.”
Szabo has crossed into their set like Keaton in Shylock, Jr., now must play out the scene, clears his throat to say her name. “Isabel Maher?”
Now it’s Meyer’s turn to smile, “She was one of the pretty girls. Socialist, working-class. Fond of reading George Bernard Shaw. Candy for the camera, but talented, whatever that means. They were about to gobble her up with a studio contract.”
“Was it voice, her voice?”
“She sounded, you know, a touch phony, classed up, maybe trained for the stage. Isabel was a smart girl, left the business. I don’t know what you’re after.”
Maya’s hand on his knee.
“It’s OK. Remember, Professor, sure you remember the closing shot of Citizen Kane. That big hand lettered sign, No Trespassing. Murky black and white.”
Of course he remembered that magnificent jigsaw of a picture, the reporter’s question never answered, the final piece only fit in place for the audience in the dark. He understood Meyer Wolf had posted his sign, though graciously showing him a silver beaker, hand-beaten.
“Probably Clara B. Welles, circa 1904.”
So they were both obsessed, both demented.
In the dark of his apartment, shades drawn, Victor Szabo turns from the blank screen. His mother had taken him to the Thalia, a Saturday afternoon. He was maybe twelve or thirteen. A revival of Citizen Kane, she said was a classic, and he knew he must love it, love this time with her at the movies stolen from everyday life on Riverside Drive. His father taught Evidence at Columbia Law and did he have to say it again: it was foolish to take in old movies with the boy, he heard himself called the boy, when the boy should be out on the ball field with his brother. Victor went to the bedroom shared with his older brother, climbed into the upper bunk. It was dusk, end of day in the Fall. If he closed his eyes he could see the shafts of light from the projector, hear the soundtrack, the clapping hands of Charles Kane at the opera—clap, clap, clap, denying his wife’s screeching failure. A football struck the wall above his head. The Monkees sang on the transistor. His mother was quiet at dinner, then perky and false. Entering the dark Thalia on a clear October day, they had done something hidden, illicit. Yes, he remembered No Trespassing, but only now understands he’d hung it on himself, closed the gate. Victor could, if he wished, pronounce upon the vanishing point of his perspective. The only paradise, the one that’s lost, was a ticket to the show at the Thalia. In the cave, only shadows. The boy should have been in the scrimmage, not collecting dusty phantoms of silence and sound, frame upon frame, so many, many should have been left on the cutting room floor.
The day after his visit in Pasadena, Victor Szabo greets his students with notes on the spatial primacy of the filmic object, no indulgence in Vitaphone, Movietone, no Garbo Speaks, no voiceless Isabel Maher.
